whitehead left no literary estate - his family carried out his instructions for all of his papers be...

Full name Alfred North Whitehead

Born 15 February 1861

Ramsgate, Kent, England

Died 30 December 1947 (aged 86)

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United

States

Era 20th century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School Process Philosophy

Main

interests

Metaphysics, Mathematics

Notable

ideas

Process Philosophy

Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North WhiteheadFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alfred North Whitehead , OM (15 February 1861 – 30December 1947) was an English mathematician whobecame a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic,foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science,physics, metaphysics, and education. Whiteheadsupervised the doctoral dissertations of Bertrand Russelland Willard Van Orman Quine, thus influencing logic andvirtually all of analytic philosophy. He co-authored theepochal Principia Mathematica with Russell.

Contents

1 Life2 Ideas3 Bibliography

3.1 Works by Whitehead3.2 Works about Whitehead and histhought

4 See also5 Notes6 External links

Life

Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England. Although his grandfather, Thomas Whitehead, was knownfor having founded Chatham House Academy, a fairly successful school for boys, Alfred North waseducated at Sherborne School, Dorset, then considered the best public school in the country. His childhoodwas described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports, mathematics and was headprefect of his class.

In 1880, Whitehead matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was fourth wrangler and gained

his BA in 1884.[1] Elected a fellow of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write mathematics at thecollege until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) and the 1900s

collaborating with his former pupil, Russell, on the first edition of Principia Mathematica.[2]

In 1910, he resigned his position at Trinity College to protest the dismissal of a colleague because of anadulterous affair. He also ran afoul of a Cambridge by-law limiting the term of a Senior Lecturer to 25 years.

In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman reared in France; they had a daughter and twosons. One son died in action while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Meanwhile,Russell spent much of 1918 in prison because of his pacifist activities. Although Whitehead visited hisco-author in prison, he did not take his pacifism seriously, while Russell sneered at Whitehead's laterspeculative Platonism and panpsychism. After the war, Russell and Whitehead seldom interacted, andWhitehead did not contribute to the 1925 second edition of Principia Mathematica.

Whitehead was always interested in theology, especially in the 1890s. His family was firmly anchored in the

Influenced by

Influenced

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Church of England: his father and uncles were vicars, while his brother would become Bishop of Madras.Perhaps influenced by his wife and the writings of Cardinal Newman, Whitehead leaned towards RomanCatholicism. Prior to World War I, he considered himself an agnostic. Later he returned to religion, withoutformally joining any church.

Concomitantly, Whitehead developed a keen interest in physics: his fellowship dissertation examined JamesClerk Maxwell's views on electricity and magnetism. His outlook on mathematics and physics was morephilosophical than purely scientific; he was more concerned about their scope and nature, rather than aboutparticular tenets and theories.

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923.

The period between 1910 and 1926 was mostly spent at University College London and Imperial CollegeLondon, where he taught and wrote on physics, the philosophy of science, and the theory and practice ofeducation. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903 and was elected to the British Academy in1931. In physics, Whitehead articulated a rival doctrine to Einstein's general relativity. His theory ofgravitation is now discredited because its predicted variability of the gravitational constant G disagrees with

experimental findings.[3] A more lasting work was his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of NaturalKnowledge (1919), a pioneering attempt to synthetize the philosophical underpinnings of physics. It has littleinfluenced the course of modern physics, however.

Whitehead's Presidential address in 1916 to the Mathematical Association of England The Aims ofEducation in the book of the same title (1929a) pointedly criticized the formalistic approach of modernBritish teachers who do not care about culture and self-education of their disciples: "Culture is activity ofthought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it."

In 1924, Henry Osborn Taylor invited Whitehead, who was then 63, to implement his ideas and teachphilosophy at Harvard University. This was a subject that fascinated Whitehead but that he had also notpreviously studied or taught. The Whiteheads spent the rest of their lives in the United States. He retiredfrom teaching in 1937. When he died in 1947 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., there was no funeral, andhis body was cremated.

Whitehead had opinions about a vast range of human endeavors. These opinions pepper the many essaysand speeches he gave on various topics between 1915 and his death (1917, 1925a, 1927, 1929a, 1929b,1933, 1938). His Harvard lectures (1924–37) are studded with quotations from his favourite poets,Wordsworth and Shelley. Most Sunday afternoons when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, theWhiteheads hosted an open house to which all Harvard students were welcome, and during which talkflowed freely. Some of the obiter dicta Whitehead spoke on these occasions were recorded by Lucien Price,a Boston journalist, who published them in 1954. That book also includes a remarkable picture of Whiteheadas the aged sage holding court. It was at one of these open houses that the young Harvard student B.F.Skinner credits a discussion with Whitehead as providing the inspiration for his work Verbal Behavior in

which language is analyzed from a behaviorist perspective.[4] Another student influenced by Whitehead wasCharles Malik, the drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’s preamble, and later president ofthe UN General Assembly. Malik wrote his PhD dissertation about Whitehead, in which Malik comparedWhitehead’s Metaphysics of Time to that of Martin Heidegger .

A two volume biography was written by Victor Lowe (1985) and Lowe and Schneewind (1990); Lowestudied under Whitehead at Harvard. A comprehensive appraisal of Whitehead's work is difficult becauseWhitehead left no Nachlass; his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after hisdeath. There is also no critical edition of Whitehead's writings.

Ideas


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The genesis of Whitehead's process philosophy may be attributed to his having witnessed the shockingcollapse of Newtonian physics, due mainly to Albert Einstein's work. His metaphysical views emerged in TheConcept of Nature (1920) and were expanded in Science and the Modern World (1925), also an importantstudy in the history of ideas and the role of science and mathematics in the rise of Western civilization.Indebted to Henri Bergson's philosophy of change, Whitehead was also a Platonist who "saw the definite

character of events as due to the "ingression" of timeless entities."[5]

In 1927, Whitehead was asked to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. These werepublished in 1929 as Process and Reality, the book that founded process philosophy, a major contribution toWestern metaphysics. Proponents of process philosophy include Charles Hartshorne and Nicholas Rescher,and his ideas have been taken up by French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. Inpoetry, the work and thought of American Charles Olson was strongly influenced by Whitehead's concepts.

Olson referred to him variously as "the cosmologist"[6] and as the "constant companion of my poem."[7]

Process and Reality is famous for its defense of theism, although Whitehead's God differs essentially fromthe revealed God of Abrahamic religions. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism gave rise to processtheology, thanks to Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr, and David Ray Griffin. Some Christians and Jewsfind process theology a fruitful way of understanding God and the universe. Just as the entire universe is inconstant flow and change, God, as source of the universe, is viewed as growing and changing. Whitehead'srejection of mind-body dualism is similar to elements in traditions such as Buddhism.

The main tenets of Whitehead's metaphysics were summarized in his most accessible work, Adventures ofIdeas (1933), where he also defines his conceptions of beauty, truth, art, adventure, and peace. He believedthat "there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays

the devil."[8]

Whitehead's political views sometimes appear to be libertarian without the label. He wrote:

“Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of two forms,force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion.War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.[9] ”

On the other hand, many Whitehead scholars read his work as providing a philosophical foundation for thesocial liberalism of the New Liberal movement that was prominent throughout Whitehead's adult life. Morriswrote that "...there is good reason for claiming that Whitehead shared the social and political ideals of the

new liberals."[10]

Bibliography

Works by Whitehead

1898. A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications. Cambridge Uni. Press. 1960 reprint,Hafner.1911. An Introduction to Mathematics. Oxford Univ. Press. 1990 paperback, ISBN 0-19-500211-3.Vol. 56 of the Great Books of the Western World series.1917. The Organization of Thought Educational and Scientific. Lippincott.1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge Uni. Press. 2004 paperback, Prometheus Books, ISBN1-59102-214-2. Being the 1919 Tarner Lectures delivered at Trinity College.1922. The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science. Cambridge Uni. Press.1925 (1910–13), with Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica, in 3 vols. Cambridge Uni. Press. Vol.1 to *56 is available as a CUP paperback.1925a. Science and the Modern World. 1997 paperback, Free Press (Simon & Schuster), ISBN


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0-684-83639-4. Vol. 55 of the Great Books of the Western World series.1925b (1919). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Cambridge Uni. Press.1926. Religion in the Making. 1974, New American Library. 1996, with introduction by Judith A.Jones, Fordham Univ. Press.1927. Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. The 1927 Barbour-Page Lectures, given at the Universityof Virginia. 1985 paperback, Fordham University Press.1929. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. 1979 corrected edition, edited by David RayGriffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press. (Part V. Final Interpretation(http://www.forizslaszlo.com/filozofia/folyamat_es_valosag/Whitehead_PR_Part5_Final_Interpratation.pdf) )1929a. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. 1985 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935180-4.1929b. Function of Reason. 1971 paperback, Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-1573-3.1933. Adventures of Ideas. 1967 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935170-7.1934. Nature and Life. University of Chicago Press.1938. Modes of Thought. 1968 paperback, Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935210-X.1947. Essays in Science and Philosophy. Runes, Dagobert, ed. Philosophical Library.1947. The Wit and Wisdom of Whitehead. Beacon Press.1951. "Mathematics and the Good" in Schilpp, P. A., ed., 1951. The Philosophy of Alfred NorthWhitehead, 2nd. ed. New York, Tudor Publishing Company: 666-81. Also printed in:

in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 1941, P. A. Schilpp, Ed.;in Science & Philosophy; Philosophical Library, 1948.

1953. A. N. Whitehead: An Anthology. Northrop, F.S.C., and Gross, M.W., eds. Cambridge Univ.Press.Price, Lucien, 1954. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, with Introduction by Sir Ross David.Reprinted 1977, Greenwood Press Reprint, ISBN 0-8371-9341-9, and 2001 with Foreword byCaldwell Titcomb, David R. Godine Publisher, ISBN 1-56792-129-9.

Works about Whitehead and his thought

Browning, Douglas and Myers, William T., eds., 1998. Philosophers of Process. Fordham Univ. Press.ISBN 0-8232-1879-1, contains some primary texts including:

"Critique of Scientific Materialism""Process""Fact and Form""Objects and Subjects""The Grouping of Occasions"

Chul Chun: Kreativität und Relativität der Welt beim frühen Whitehead: Alfred North Whiteheadsfrühe Naturphilosophie (1915–1922) - eine Rekonstruktion, mit einem Vorwort von Michael Welker,Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-7887-2352-1Contemporary Whitehead Studies (book series). Rodopi.Durand G., 2007. "Des événements aux objets. La méthode de l'abstraction extensive chez A. N.Whitehead". Ontos Verlag.Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.------, 2002, "Algebras, Projective Geometry, Mathematical Logic, and Constructing the World:Intersections in the Philosophy of Mathematics of A. N. Whitehead," Historia Mathematica 29:427-62. Many references.Griffin, David Ray, 2007. "Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy. An Argument forIts Contemporary Relevance", New York: State University of New York Press.Hartshorne, Charles (1972). Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970. University ofNebraska PressHenning, Brian G. The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality, and Nature in a Processive Cosmos.University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.Holtz, Harald and Ernest Wolf-Gazo, eds. Whitehead und der Prozeßbegriff / Whitehead and The


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Idea of Process. Proceedings of The First International Whitehead-Symposion. Verlag Karl Alber,Freiburg i. B. / München 1984. ISBN 3-495-47517-6Johnson, A. H. (Allison Heartz), Ed., (2007) The Wit and Wisdom of Alfred North Whitehead.Kessinger Publishing.Kneebone, G., 2001, (1963). Mathematical Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics. Doverreprint: ISBN 0-486-41712-3. The final chapter is a lucid introduction to some of the ideas inWhitehead (1919, 1925b, 1929).LeClerc, Ivor, ed., 1961. The Relevance of Whitehead. Allen & Unwin.Lowe, Victor, 1962. Understanding Whitehead. Johns Hopkins Uni. Press.------, 1985. A. N. Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 1. Johns Hopkins U. Press.------, and Schneewind, J. B., 1990. A. N. Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Vol. 2. Johns HopkinsU. Press.Martin, Richard Milton, 1974. Whitehead's Categorial Scheme and Other Essays. Martinus Nijhoff.Mays, Wolfgang, 1959. The Philosophy of Whitehead. Allen & Unwin.------, 1977. Whitehead's Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics: An Introduction to his Thought.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.Mesle, C. Robert, 2008. Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred NorthWhitehead," Templeton foundation Press. ISBN 978-1-59947-132-7Nobo, Jorge L., 1986. Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. SUNY Press.Willard Quine, 1941, "Whitehead and the rise of modern logic" in Schilpp (1941). Reprinted in his1995 Selected Logic Papers. Harvard Univ. Press.Rapp, Friedrich and Reiner Wiehl, eds. Whiteheads Metaphysik der Kreativität. InternationalesWhitehead-Symposium Bad Homburg 1983. . Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg i. B. / München 1986. ISBN3-495-47612-1Rescher, Nicholas, 1995. Process Metaphysics. SUNY Press.------, 2001. Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues. Univ. of Pittsburg Press.Siebers, Johan, 2002. The method of speculative philosophy: an essay on the foundations ofWhitehead's metaphysicis. Kassel: Kassel University Press GmbH. ISBN 3-933146-79-8Schilpp, Paul A., ed., 1941. The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead (The Library of Living Philosophers).New York: Tudor.Smith, Olav Bryant, 2004. Myths of the Self: Narrative Identity and Postmodern Metaphysics,Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, [ISBN 0-7391-0843-3], contains a section called 'Alfred NorthWhitehead: Toward a More Fundamental Ontology' that is an overview of Whitehead's metaphysics.Stengers, Isabelle, 2002. Penser avec Whitehead. Seuil.Weber, Michel, 2006. Whitehead's Pancreativism—The Basics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.Will, Clifford, 1993. Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics. Cambridge University Press.

See also

Fallacy of misplaced concretenessInert knowledgePanexperientialismPhilosophy of OrganismProcess philosophyWhitehead's point-free geometryAmerican philosophyWhitehead Research Project

Notes

^ Whitehead, Alfred North (http://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search.pl?sur=&suro=c&fir=&firo=c&cit=&cito=c&c=all&tex=WHTT879AN&sye=&eye=&col=all&maxcount=50) in Venn, J. & J. A., AlumniCantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.

1.


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^ On Whitehead the mathematician and logician, see Grattan-Guinness (2000, 2002), and Quine's chapter inSchilpp (1941), reprinted in Quine (1995).

2.

^ Y. Tanaka: The Comparison between Whitehead's and Einstein's Theories of Relativity (From the viewpointof empirical tests) (http://web.archive.org/web/20041204230632/http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/%7Esn2y-tnk/tanaka_4_4.htm)

3.

^ Skinner, B.F. 1957. Verbal Behavior, appendix.4.^ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2006.5.^ Von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978: p. 2.6.^ Polis is this: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place. Dir. Ferrini, Henry, and Ken Riaf.7.^ Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, recorded by Lucien Price, p. 13, 20018.^ Adventures of Ideas p. 105, 1933 edition; p. 83, 1967 ed.9.^ Morris, Randall C., Journal of the History of Ideas 51: 75-92. p. 92.10.

External links

Whitehead Research Project (http://whiteheadresearch.org/) , dedicated to the research of, andscholarship on, the texts, philosophy and life of Alfred North Whitehead; explores and analyzes therelevance of Whitehead's thought in dialogue with contemporary philosophiesCenter for Process Studies (http://www.ctr4process.org/) at the Claremont School of Theology.Primarily concerned with the thought of Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, and the various modes ofthought that have emerged out of their work.Society for the Study of Process Philosophies (http://www.processphilosophies.org/)Critical Edition of Whitehead (http://whiteheadresearch.org/research/cew/)Whitehead, Alfred N., A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications (http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.chmm/1263316509) , CambridgeUniversity Press, 1898 (full text).Irvine, A. D. "Alfred North Whitehead" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/) , StanfordEncyclopedia of PhilosophyO'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Alfred North Whitehead" (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Whitehead.html) , MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, Universityof St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Whitehead.html.A N Whitehead: New World Philosopher (http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/whitehead.html)Centre de philosophie pratique « Chromatiques whiteheadiennes » (http://www.chromatika.org/)Works by Alfred North Whitehead (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Alfred+North+Whitehead) atProject GutenbergSynge, John L. "Whitehead's Principle of Relativity (http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0505027) " onarXiv.orgDuring, Elie. 2007. "Philosophical twins ? Bergson and Whitehead on Langevin's Paradox and theMeaning of 'Space-Time'" (http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=136) in Durand, G. &Weber, M., eds., Alfred North Whitehead's Principles of Natural Knowledge. Frankfurt & Lancaster:Ontos Verlag.During, Elie. 2008. "Durations and Simultaneities : Temporal Perspectives and Relativistic Time inWhitehead and Bergson" (http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=211) in M. Weber (ed.),Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought. Frankfurt & Lancaster: Ontos Verlag.

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